Flying Contraptions:
The Flying Lawn Chair
In 1982, a 33-year-old truck driver named Larry Walters proved that you don’t need sophisticated technology to fly. Walters lashed 45 helium weather balloons, weighted with jugs of spring water for ballast, to an aluminum lawn chair and took off from the backyard of his fiancee’s home in San Pedro, California. Why a lawn chair? “I wanted to be comfortable,” he later explained to the Washington Post. Walters wore a parachute and carried two citizens band radios and a BB gun, which he intended to use to shoot out the balloons when he wanted to return to the ground. He rose to about 16,000 feet, but never got anywhere near his intended destination of the Mojave Desert, 300 miles away. Instead, Walters drifted back to Earth in nearby Long Beach, where he became entangled in a power line and briefly caused a blackout in a small section of the city. While Walters’ stunt garnered newspaper headlines across the nation, the Federal Aviation Administration wasn’t amused and cited “the chaise lounge Lindbergh,” as the Christian Science Monitor dubbed him, with multiple violations of federal aircraft regulations. In the summer of 2008, Kent Couch, a 48-year-old gas station owner, improved on Walters, successfully flying 235 miles across the Oregon desert in a lawn chair rigged with helium-filled party balloons.
^M
